Wundt

• What is introspection?


  The process through which people can gain knowledge about their own internal thoughts
• Wundt -> thought mental processes like memory and perception are observed through introspection.

  • in introspection, observers are given an object or picture and asked to reflect on their own perception and thought process.
  • he developed a theory of emotion called the tridimentional theory of feeling. Said all emotions and feelings can be plotted within the three frameworks of tense-relaxed, excited-depression, and pleasant-unpleasant.
• The emergence of psychology as a science


  Wundt is credited with moving psychology into the realm of science.

  • However, later psychologists, like the behaviourists, rejected introspection as scientific—said introspection was too subjective and not empirical.
  • Behaviorists claimed we should only focuson behaviour that we can directly observe and measure
  • Behaviourism became the first truly scientific way to study human behaviour.
• The scientific method


  To be scientific, research and theories must be objective, systematic, and replicable.

  Research must be empirical to be scientific.
• Strengths of Wundt

  • Some of the methods used by wundt would be recognised as scientific today
  • The same standardised procedure was used for each participant, which allowed procedures to be replicated
  • His work marked the separation of the modern psychology from its broader philosophical roots.
• Weaknesses

  • It relied heavily on 'non-observable' responses, which was criticised by behaviourists
  • Introspection 'experimental' results were not reliably reproducible by other researchers
  • The processes such as perception and memory were considered to be unobservable constructions.